For this model to work you need a benevolent entity running the fiber network. Verizon runs a highly profitable wireless internet network which in many cases competes against high speed fixed internet. It is in their interest to kill fiber to the curb not keep it going. This might work if you spun off the fiber business or handed it over to a traditional utility like ConEd or National Grid. But then those electric utilities would probably end up using internet service to subsidize keeping the old electric grid going as that business enters its death spiral.

What a silly thing to say. I wouldn't know how to create a shoe if you paid me. It's a skill that takes years to master and it is relatively useless in the modern world. 99.9% of all driving is for getting to work or to chores. If you can do without adding another stressful and annoying task to the mix, by all means do!

The places you can explore by car are severely limited. There needs to be a road there. For exploring, learning to fly a plane, navigate a boat, and ride a bike are much more useful skills; and of course keep yourself in good enough shape that you make good use of hiking boots. If I could take back all those tens of thousands of hours spent driving a car and spend them on actual exploring I would do it in a nanosecond. I hardly knew my environs outside of walking distance when I was driving there, when I started riding a bicycle for distances under ten miles I was gob-smacked at all the cool things I'd missed when speeding by.

Native born isn't really the issue. It is pretty easy to argue he isn't native born if you just look at the original constitution. But the 14th amendment pretty much states that if you a citizen you have full rights whether naturalized or born, and of course anyone born in the country is a citizen. This means the whole native born stuff is meaningless now. By the time this amendment was passed the country no-longer worried that England might infiltrate the government and put an Englishman in charge and there was the very real problem of the Southern states abridging the rights of blacks.

If he is a citizen he can run for president, under the law of the land at the time all he had to do to naturalize was file a short form stating that his mother was a US citizen. My mother filed this form on my behalf when I was a child and I got a nice letter from Jimmy Carter. Same with McCain, he was probably born in a hospital outside the canal zone, but it doesn't matter due to the 14th amendment. He is unquestionably a citizen.

Per the NYC Department of Education children 5 and above are expected to walk up to 0.5 miles to school. Children between 5 and 11 are expected to walk up to 1 mile, and children 12 and above up are expected to walk or bike up to 1.5 miles to school.

Being run over by a car is by far the most likely tragety to occur to a child walking home from school so I looked up ped/bike fatalities in Maryland, and it is 1.88 per 100,000. This is actually lower than NYC, which had 2.00 such deaths per 100,000.

The national maximum speed limit was repealed under Bill Clinton so federal funding is not an issue.

Safety is an issue. Crashes on highways are no more frequent at higher speeds so long as they are designed for it, they are however more deadly. In Germany you have two additional things that make it possible to have high or no speed limit on intercity highways. First, the driver training is of much higher quality, you will never see anyone changing lanes without signalling on the autobahn. Second, there is generally a parallel slower road. If an 85 mph road is the only option then you will have people who are little tired or had a glass of wine with dinner on it. Not a recipe for success.

#1 is a killer for most American cities. When you look at ones built in the last 50 years they are just not designed for getting around in any way but the car. Even when you look at cities built before the car they often have been destroyed by parking minimums in the zoning code that lead to huge parking craters and significant distances between points of interest. If you need a car for two peak travel time trips every day you might as well have your own.

When we fix it so that most people can commute to work without a car again then there are many models of ownership that might make sense. But self-driving cars are a red herring. They don't address the space inefficiency of cars both when moving and when parked. They won't work on streets anytime soon (as opposed to roads which are significantly easier to navigate). And they don't address the peak demand problem.

If you address #1, #2 would be easy enough to solve. Like many who don't use my car for getting to work I don't give a whit about #3 anymore plus you could do a lot of customization via profiles stored in your car rental account. #4 is what I mostly use my car for these days, it is a peak proplem, I use my car disproportionately on the same holidays everyone else does. But I don't leave the city on every holiday. I could see a zipcar type service keeping up with that kind of peak and not everyone is hauling stuff. Other countries have luxury busses for liesure travel, if car ownership weren't so high here I'm sure we would too.

We don't need more money in the highway trust fund. Driving has been decreasing nationwide for a long time now. Just pass a rule saying that trust fund capital dollars can only be used for shrinking roads, adding toll infrastructure, or converting them to some greater use such as transit. Allow some money to be used for maintenance, but not the current 90%, and make funding contingent on the state requesting it keeping 95% of the system in good repair.

But add a $5/gallon carbon tax along with an income tax exemption increase. The mode shift from that will greatly decrease the need for road repairs. In my municipality we spend a $1000 per car per year out of the general funds for street repair.

The number of crashes that happen with both parties following the law is practically none. Pretty much every crash is due to multiple factors, but a healthy majority of fatal crashes are caused by the big three: speeding, failing to yield and running red lights. The rest are caused by a variety of causes. Starting with what you might suspect, cell phone usage and drunk driving, and ending with random low probability stuff like heart attacks and vehicle defects.

If we just tamed the big three the US would save 15,000+ lives each year and prevent another 1,000,000 casualties.

Right now there should be strict limits on the number of autonomous vehicles per state, say 50 per state. Enough to do R&D, but not enough to be a serious nuisance. But when they are ready to drive down a Manhattan street then there should be no driver's license required and no insurance required of the vehicle owner. The company writing the software should be required to have a policy that pays a significant amount per injured party, say $10 million. So if a car plows into a large gathering of people the $250,000,000 payout will be covered.

The crash rate should be significantly smaller with autonomous cars, but it is important that we don't allow the self-driving car companies to shift responsibility onto the passengers in the vehicle. If you aren't actively driving the car you won't be ready to take the wheel when the software loses control and we want the incentive for making the software ever safer to remain with the writers of the software.

The carriages drive along a crowded jogging paths where motorized vehicles are banned for safety reasons. Allowing this monstrosity where you can't ride a Vespa makes no sense. A reconstruction of a light early electric like a 1902 Wood's Phaeton would have some charm and would be much safer to everyone it encounters in the park.

Highway speed limits are significantly less than conditions allow but speeding is a huge problem on residential streets. Over the last 40's the highways have as a matter of policy been engineered to be pretty safe for people going a bit over the speed limit. This conditions drivers to speed and then they carry over this behavior to streets where is generally not even safe to go near the speed limit most times of day.

Really we need to revisit the whole approach to speed limits. We can make them electronic on all highways and adjust them to conditions. Then we can set them at 90 mph when conditions warrant, but in exchange we should enforce these speed limits with an iron fist. If you go 1% over you get a $50 ticket, 5% $500 ticket, 10% over $5000, 15% $50,000, etc. with various Jail times for greater speeding. And forget having cops for this, just cameras that take a picture of the perp. We can have cameras every 1000ft and we can forget about conspiracies to signal the presence of speed traps.

This is exactly why NYC ordered individual cars last time around. They wanted to be able to scavange good cars into a train if maintenance fell behind. They had been forced to do so in the 1970's and 1980's. In practice they have married sets of cars together and maintain them as a set.

Articulated cars were run on the NYC subway from 1925 to 1965, google D-type Triplex, but each car needs to be shorter. I don't think anyone knows what the impact of running articulated cars again would be. It is worth an engineering study.